All the philosophy that's not fit to print.

Is belief in the Enlightenment religious?

by Duncan Richter

The MOOC I'm taking on Chinese philosophy is sadly coming to an end. One of its last pieces is a lecture by Edward Slingerland about the value of studying classical Chinese thought. In this lecture he shows part of an exchange between himself and others, including the Churchlands, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. It's interesting to me because Slingerland seems obviously right, at least more or less, and yet here are multiple intelligent people (plus Sam Harris, ho ho) disagreeing with him. So I'm curious whether what I think is true is a) agreed with, and b) regarded as obvious by others.

The exchange is from a conference called Beyond Belief at the Salk Institute in 2007. Here are the kinds of things Slingerland says, which he says he has learned from Charles Taylor. I'm quoting from the transcript provided with the course:

commitment to Enlightenment views is not something that just falls rationally out of an objective view of the world

We then rely on beliefs that are empirically unverifiable in the sense that "happiness is good" is not something you could ever really prove scientifically, right?

So I'm a Western liberal. I believe that girls should go to school. I believe that a woman's right to choose and control her body trumps any rights supposed of the unborn fetus. I believe that gay couples should enjoy the same rights to marry and share insurance as straight couples. But Taylor's point-- and this is the important one--is that there's no fact of the matter that I could point to prove definitively to someone who disagrees with me on these topics that I'm right and they're wrong. At the end of the day, these kind of liberal commitments bottom out in beliefs and beliefs in these non-empirically verifiable frameworks that we are committed to in a faith-like way. And we believe they're true. We want to impose on other people. We want other people to share our beliefs. But there's no empirical evidence that would prove that we're right, and other people are wrong.

I might quibble about the "faith-like way" part, but it amazes me that anyone disputes these claims. So, what are the contrary claims or arguments?

Someone identified in the transcript just as an audience member but in the video as Patricia Smith Churchland says this:

I think that human rights, to the degree that that can be given a concrete description, is something that works pretty well in a sheerly pragmatic way. Human rights matter to me, because, by and large, if you have a system that works according to those principles, you do better than if you have a tyrant.

That sounds true. But can what works pragmatically be determined in some value-neutral way that nevertheless supports respect for human rights over tyranny? Do we measure how well something is working by counting deaths or injuries or fights or instances of laws being broken or average life expectancy or what? And why focus only, or primarily, on what works for human beings? There is doubtless more to be said, but does more need saying?

In fairness to Churchland, she is responding here to the idea that there is some kind of "metaphysical" "leap of faith" involved in belief in human rights. She is not, that is, necessarily claiming that such belief is proved empirically or scientifically. But if her objection is only to the idea that metaphysics is involved or that belief in rights is best understood as involving a leap of faith then I agree with her. To the extent that what she says here is meant to contradict what I have quoted Slingerland saying above then I think she has missed the point.

Next up is Paul Churchland, who says:

If one wants to take an objectivist view about the ground of morality, better to look at human history and what it teaches us over long periods of time than to made up metaphysical things.

Hopefully we can agree that we don't want to ground morality in made up metaphysical things. But what does it mean to talk about what history teaches us? I don't mean that history teaches us nothing. I mean that history cannot teach us that x is good or that y is bad. It can show what gets us what we want and what leads to things we don't want, maybe, but it won't show what we ought to want. People who oppose same-sex marriage, for instance, mostly do not claim that it will lead to this or that bad result. They claim that the thing itself is bad. And they might well claim also that if everyone comes to accept it as normal then this too will be a bad thing. I think they are wrong, but surely history will never, can never, show which side is right about this.

Then comes Daniel Dennett:

I think Hume is both an Enlightenment figure and also has some very elegant and impressive ideas about how the natural sympathies, our instinctual sympathies, they are indeed the basis. They are the foundation for our morality. But then we add artificial virtues on top of them. We develop, in effect, eyeglasses for the soul. And this is not, as you might say, a scientific development entirely. It is in large measure a political one. It is the history of political discussion and what Paul was talking about, this trial and error and what we've learned about what works and what doesn't work. And this, eventually, homes in on a set of ethical values, what ethics in philosophy has been really working on the last several thousand years. The whole reason that the Enlightenment is not a religion is that although we feel uncomfortable challenging our sacred values, we challenge them.

I don't know how true it is that we seriously challenge our sacred Enlightenment values, but I'm happy to agree that the Enlightenment is not a religion. It may be religion-like in some ways, but it's also different enough (to my mind) to be classified differently. But what Dennett recognizes as a political rather than scientific development is basically an ethical one, a normative one. Which is Slingerland's point.

Then, finally, comes Sam Harris, who wants to boil ethics down to a question of psychological well-being that is meant to be understood in a way that is simultaneously purely scientific and incompatible with much of Islam (in particular, not religion in general). This is a good example of a non-philosopher presupposing utilitarianism (but with added bigotry-fuel) without realizing it.

And that's it. As I say, Slingerland's point seems pretty much indisputable to me, which is one reason why I have not bothered to defend it at length above. But if others do dispute it I'd be curious to know why.

Comments

Is belief in the Enlightenment religious?

by Duncan Richter

The MOOC I'm taking on Chinese philosophy is sadly coming to an end. One of its last pieces is a lecture by Edward Slingerland about the value of studying classical Chinese thought. In this lecture he shows part of an exchange between himself and others, including the Churchlands, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. It's interesting to me because Slingerland seems obviously right, at least more or less, and yet here are multiple intelligent people (plus Sam Harris, ho ho) disagreeing with him. So I'm curious whether what I think is true is a) agreed with, and b) regarded as obvious by others.